


Capture

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, Mild Gore, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:01:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deanon from the kinkmeme. A young Albion gets caught during the early days of the Roman Invasion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capture

Albion had learned to fear the whip. The first few days after the feral wood child had been dragged in by a patrol, it had been a literal tooth and nail battle to subdue him. He'd been whipped, and sunk his teeth into the hand holding the whip as soon as he could crane his neck to get that close. They'd tried again, and though he cried and howled through it, the Roman had still earned a broken nose for his trouble. The third time he'd been beaten til he was sick, and curled up without a fight like the good, whimpering dog he was. The sharp script of discipline written into his back had yet to subside, flaring up every time the sackcloth of his new uniform chafed against his skin.

Finally subdued, he was thrown in with the rest, decked out in chains that thwarted all his effort to break them. He hissed away attempts to touch him, hating the cold hands and frightened eyes of the other prisoners, and cowered in the corner of the cell, relishing the cool stone burning the stripes in his back as a sign he was still alive. The same cold-warm feeling roiled in his stomach in place of anything else to fill it: he tried to rub his belly to ease the nausea, but the chains screeched with every movement and he quickly stopped.

Time was an uncertainty. There were no windows to see the sun from, no real schedule to the occasional passing of a guard or arrival of scraps for them to curb their starvation with. For a while, he took to counting in his head as high as he knew and holding a finger every time he reached the extent of his knowledge. Ten times he held both hands and released them, rocking gently with the rhythm in his head, when he was interrupted by a man to his left crying for his mother and lost count. He bit back tears and didn’t start again. 

Despite having long since been defeated by the shackles round his wrists and ankles, he continued to tug at them, a gesture that had become almost automatic in the time since he'd first been caught. The persistent dull ache flared with sparks of pain as his scabbed skin caught and tore on the rough iron, and then the familiar wetness of blood. His eldest brother would have scolded him being so stupid, irritating a wound like that and making it easier for the fever and the rot to set in. His brother wasn't here though, and the gruff voice was just in his head.

When he slept that night- was it night? It could have been high noon with a bright sun and he’d never have known- he dreamt his mother threw him to the wolves. Their teeth and claws drew bright lines of fire across his back, and they set their bloody jaws to chewing off his hands and feet. He was cuffed awake by the boy beside him when his screaming grew too loud. While the other went back to sleep, he wept against the stone floor and recognised the fever chill shivering through bones with relief. However long later he drifted off again, dreaming of fire and laurel branches setting the blaze.

Eventually, the soldiers or whoever it was that held them, dragged them all out into tentative morning sunshine. The smallest of the lot, Albion was lost amidst a sea of taller bodies, stumbling over feet and falling into elbows, and finally dragged to the front by an irritated stranger in Roman uniform. Wincing away from the sun in his sore eyes, he got an impression of a crowd before clamouring voices crashed over him. The noise and the constant shift of bodies ahead of and behind him made him feel ill. The heat; the bright sun in his eyes; the sibilant wash of alien words all blurred together in a single mess of overwhelming sensation. He rattled his chains and screamed just to find himself amidst the chaos. A sharp strike from his keeper shut him up. The butt of the whip left a welt on his face.

It eventually dawned on him what was happening, as the movement of the sun ticked the hours away and the clamour slowly diminished. The unfamiliar Latin being tossed about by the crowd was repetitive and marked by the clink of coins; the group from the cell was dwindling.

They were being sold.

The boys and the younger men went first. He didn't have to be told why the youngest boys sold for the highest prices. The truth was clear in the covetous eyes of the bidders and sat like lead in the pit of his stomach, a cold lump of dread. He’d be next: any time now the coins handed over-glinting gold perhaps, for he was a century going on seven- would be for him. Reduced to a plaything for a Roman who didn’t know what he held. Nothing had really changed.

His gaze lingered on every member of the crowd as numbers were called, his nervous breaths in time with the mounting numbers. Not his. Not for him. The man next to him disappeared for a handful of copper. Not him. Don’t be next. A boy to his right, with a payment of silver. He could feel eyes lingering on him and yanked automatically at his chains, wincing as they clanked like coins. Not him. Please, not him.

Something drove them away from him though. A poorly behaved slave, marked by a continued need for punishment and sick with fever that rattled through him: no one would take him. As one of the few left over by the end, he was thrilled by the notion that he might die before the next market rolled around. The cell seemed safe when faced with this, and he was almost glad to curl up in his corner when he was returned there with the rest of the dregs.

Again, he had no idea of time. Food was still delivered, when they remembered, but he’d long since stopped eating. It didn’t make much difference to him if he ate or not. He shivered himself to sleep and dreamed of things he couldn’t remember when the clawing sickness in his stomach dragged him awake again. He tried to think of his brothers, but couldn’t bring their faces to mind or recall the sound of their languages, only the echoing unfamiliarity of the baying crowd. Albion tried to be upset about it, but he was too tired by that point. Eventually he succumbed to unconsciousness without dreaming at all, and didn’t rouse again.

The next time he woke, it was to the smell of fear and fire, the clash of weapons and the screams of people dying in the streets beyond the cell walls. He could feel some of them expiring, a flash of nausea, oh so familiar by this point, for every Briton falling to the sword or the flames. That was what had awoken him, but it wasn’t enough to hold his concentration. He drifted, flinching as the fallen increased, trying to remember if the consuming heat was under his skin or outside the cell. The screech of the cell door opening and the scuffle of the other prisoners evacuating passed him by. Someone might have spoken to him but he wasn’t sure and didn’t respond, not until they caught hold of him and dragged him outside.

Everything was burning around them, accented by the roar of battle. Whoever had hauled him out had quickly abandoned him in the dirt without him ever seeing their face. The grit bit into his hands as he levered himself up, hampered by his chains. The chaos of noise and heat and violence was just like the market, dragging him down with it til he wasn’t certain where he ended and the destruction of the town began. Albion longed for the cool quiet of the cell.

He stumbled and fell against the wall of an anonymous building whose stones had yet to crumble, and watched the world was end around him in a whirlwind of fire and death that curdled his blood and let the sick heat into his stomach and heart. Idly, he wondered how long it would take him to die. Would he be engulfed like everything else, or would he only be allowed to succumb when he was the only thing left?

A Roman gladius nearly put him out of his misery when the soldier unexpectedly stumbled across him. The soldier recovered faster than he did, bringing the weapon to bear with a hand scarred by the half ring of a bite mark. Albion held up his hands, chains dragging at his wrists, praying as the sword descended. Even he wasn’t sure if he was praying for his life or his death.

The soldier was struck down before he could make the choice, collapsing into the dust with a Roman axe lodged in his skull. Albion’s trembling hands dropped to cover his face, hiding his confused tears from this new enemy. He briefly resisted the rough grip that tried to drag his hands away, to expose him, but the fight had long drained out of him. The chains rang as his hands were peeled back. He caught a glimpse of russet hair made bright by firelight- not a Roman colour- before those rough hands, rough arms closed around him, silencing the chains they held him so tight.

He couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t matter. Those arms were the only thing that stopped him from shattering and flying apart. He would have clung too were he not still bound. A name rose to the surface of his mind, as his own was repeated in his ears like a litany to the gods. It meant mountains, and breath that puffed out in clouds, and a sweet chill in the air that was a balm to the heat that had nearly consumed him.

“Alba.”


End file.
